Empowering 70 sales people to sell more

Key Achievements: empowering a 70 people sales team with data to sell more while freeing up 30% of the customer service resources’ time.

Challenges

The client is a mid-size market wholesaler with a sales force of more than 70 people. Before working with us, the sales representatives – who each visit 5-10 clients everyday – had to rely on their gut feeling to close sales based on what they remembered was purchased the previous year by their accounts. This process led to three main challenges:

Customer service resources’ waste: everyday, the sales reps would call their company’s customer service department whose 20 people would spend more than a third of their time answering to accounts-related questions.

Missed sales: both the sales reps and the accounts would often forget what was purchased the previous year and why it was purchased.

Substantial meeting preparation time: the sales representatives would need a lot of time to prepare each meeting because the data was displayed in different systems. This would result in sales reps putting in less effort in meeting preparation.

Solution

Working closely with the sales representatives, we developed an automated dashboard showing the most important customers information all in one place, in real-time. This mobile optimized system enables sales people to know exactly what to sell to their accounts, prior to the meeting. It also enables to them go through the list of previous purchases with the customers directly during the meetings and to identify the products that may have been forgotten this year. Finally, this dashboard saves the sales people a substantial amount of time as there is no time spent of information gathering: key customers data is all in one place and can be acted on straight away.

Key saving benefits & Return on investment

Customer service department: the customer service’s resources utilized by the 70 sales reps to request information that is now available in the dashboard amount to more 150,000 GBP / year

Missed sales by sales reps : On the first day after the dashboard deployment, the company’s IT department received multiple emails from the sales representatives mentioning additional sales of a few thousands pounds closed thanks to the in-meeting visibility offered by the dashboard. Whilst it is impossible to predict how many more sales will be closed thanks to the new system, the potential additional money brought in by the 70 sales reps in one year can be substantial given what happened just on the release day.

Meeting preparation time saved: The sales people have now access to all their accounts info in one place and can save hours every week that were spent to gather information from multiple systems.

The Return on Investment (ROI) on this project is greater than 10X.

Evolution

This solution was a quick-win that then translated into re-organizing the whole sales department and building a few other solutions. Simultaneously, we were hired by the client to re-organize and rebuild the analytics of the entire company.